Taking Responsibility for Torture

An interior view of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, at the C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia.

Photograph by Christopher Morris/VII

More than twelve years after the C.I.A. began torturing Al Qaeda suspects in secret prisons overseas, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence today made public the executive summary of its sixty-seven-hundred-page report on the agency’s coercive interrogation program. The report has prompted loud objections from Michael Hayden, the former head of the C.I.A., and Dick Cheney, with good reason: it is a damning indictment of the Bush Administration’s approach to interrogation in the war on terror. The committee, which reviewed over six million C.I.A. records, based its report entirely on the agency’s own documentation of what transpired. The records depict a program founded on false premises, maintained for five years despite the absence of any evidence that it worked, and covered up by repeated falsehoods to the White House, Congress, and the American public.

The report’s central lesson is that when government officials abandon the obligation to treat human beings with dignity, that decision will corrode all that follows. Jeremy Waldron, a professor at N.Y.U. Law School, has argued that the prohibition on torture is absolute because it is central to the idea of the rule of law. The Senate report is a vivid confirmation of that insight. The C.I.A.’s decision to use torture tainted everything it did in connection with the program. What began as an effort to find out the truth about terrorist threats led to the C.I.A. repeatedly lying to cover up its own wrongs.

Before the September 11th terrorist attacks, the C.I.A. understood that torture and other coercive interrogation methods “do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers,” and have “proven to be ineffective.” After 9/11, however, the agency almost immediately began concocting theories to justify the use of such tactics. It objected to extending Geneva Convention protections to Al Qaeda detainees because they might have impeded interrogation efforts. (President Bush obliged by finding, in a determination reversed by the Supreme Court, that Al Qaeda detainees were not protected by the Geneva Convention.) Without a shred of evidence that coercive interrogation worked, the C.I.A. deputized two psychologists, neither of whom had experience in interrogation, to devise a set of coercive interrogation techniques. The agency applied them to its first detainee, Abu Zubaydah, even though he had already been providing valuable intelligence in response to lawful F.B.I. questioning, including identifying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of 9/11.

Once the Department of Justice and the White House authorized the C.I.A. to use “enhanced interrogation techniques”—which included extended sleep deprivation, stress positions, slamming suspects into walls, slapping, confinement in small boxes, and waterboarding—the agency never looked back. Perhaps sensing that it had committed the original sin, it did everything in its power to prevent the discovery of its actions—including repeatedly misrepresenting the facts to other agencies, the White House, the Congress, and the public.

The report makes clear that the agency’s wrongs were legion. Of the hundred and nineteen persons illegally disappeared into secret prisons, twenty-six did not even qualify under the expansive detention authority President Bush gave the C.I.A. One detainee was “an ‘intellectually challenged’ man whose CIA detention was used solely as leverage to get a family member to provide information.” Two others were deemed to be “connected to al-Qa’ida based solely on information fabricated by a CIA detainee subject to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.”

The interrogators went far beyond the brutality that they had been formally authorized to inflict. At least five detainees were subjected to “rectal feeding” and “rectal hydration,” often without any medical necessity, as a way to humiliate and assert control over the individual. C.I.A. interrogators threatened to kill detainees, and to kill, injure, or sexually assault their family members if they did not talk.

Most of all, the C.I.A. lied. It lied about how many detainees it held. At one point, an agent informed Michael Hayden, then the C.I.A. director, that while the agency claimed to have detained fewer than a hundred people, the actual number was higher. Hayden instructed the agent “to keep the detainee number at 98” in his reports. The agency lied about the effectiveness of the program, telling the Department of Justice, the White House, and others that it had developed critical evidence, when in fact its own records show that it had not. And it lied repeatedly and systematically to Congress.

Perhaps the report’s most damning section is an appendix titled “Example of Inaccurate CIA Testimony to the Committee—April 12, 2007.” It consists of a table comparing Hayden’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee with information from the C.I.A.’s records, and identifies about thirty specific instances in which the former is directly contradicted by the latter. They include false and misleading statements about the interrogation of Zubaydah, the qualifications of C.I.A. interrogators, the agency’s reporting practices regarding abuse, the number of detainees subjected to enhanced interrogation, the utility of information obtained in disrupting terrorist plots, and threats of sodomy and other inappropriate behavior. And this was all in a single day of testimony. The extent of the prevarication leads one to wonder whether anything Hayden said that day was true.

The report’s depiction of the agency’s abuses and deceptions unquestionably does the American public a great service. As Senator John McCain noted in a floor statement after the report’s release, “Our enemies act without conscience. We must not. This executive summary … makes clear that acting without conscience isn’t necessary, it isn’t even helpful, in winning this strange and long war we’re fighting. We should be grateful to have that truth affirmed.”

In one crucial respect, however, the Senate report falls short. By putting the blame for the program exclusively on the C.I.A., it fails to acknowledge that responsibility for it does not stop there. President George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Attorney General John Ashcroft, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, among others, all signed off on the authorization to use enhanced interrogation techniques—tactics that, as President Obama and many others have said, any reasonable person would recognize amount to torture. The Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee share in the responsibility, for writing legal memos that gave the C.I.A. a green light to engage in patently illegal conduct. And while the Senate Intelligence Committee was undoubtedly misled about the details of the program, it failed to take action to halt it, even though it was fully aware that detainees were being illegally disappeared and waterboarded.

Nor does accountability end there. We reëlected George Bush knowing that he had approved of waterboarding and torture. We have accepted President Obama’s contention that we should look forward, not backward, thereby absolving those who committed war crimes of any accountability. Criminal prosecutions are both unlikely and unnecessary, but some form of official accountability is essential. This report is a start, but as a polity we have not lived up to our own responsibility, to demand accountability for the wrongs done in our name.

David Cole is the author, most recently, of “Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law.”

What the report will truly show the world in 2014 is not what we’ve done but how we come to terms with it. We’ve missed too many opportunities already.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.